Keystone starts with almost everything switched off. That is deliberate: a mod that turns on eleven features on a server it has never seen is a mod you spend your first evening switching off.

One thing to know first

Being a Minecraft operator is not the same as being allowed to use Keystone. It has its own permissions, so that "can restart the server" and "can fly" are separate questions. From the console you can do everything already — the console is always allowed — so that is where you start.

From 0.1.1 an admin group with keystone.* is already there and empty, so it is one line:

keystone permission group admin add <your name>

On 0.1.0 there is no admin group — the only one that exists is default, which everybody is in — so it has to be made first:

keystone permission group admin create 100
keystone permission group admin allow keystone.*
keystone permission group admin add <your name>

The first line makes the group at weight 100, the second gives it everything, and the third puts you in it. Now /keystone works for you in game as well.

keystone permission groups lists what exists, and keystone permission check <player> <permission> answers why somebody may or may not.

Open the editor

/keystone panel

It hands you a link. Click it and the whole mod is configurable in a browser — the editor ships inside the file you downloaded, so it works with no internet and there is no account and no password. The link lasts five minutes, works once, and is exchanged for a key that lasts a day.

The local API listens on 127.0.0.1 by default, so the link opens from the machine the server runs on. From anywhere else, tunnel over SSH — and from 0.1.1, use api.reachable-at; see the panel.

Look around before you change anything

• Performance — /keystone test 20 places twenty test players, measures the server around them and tells you how many this machine actually holds with your modpack on it, and what gives out first. It takes a couple of minutes and it is the most useful thing you can do on a new server.
• Console — the last few hundred lines, with chat beside them, so you do not need SSH to see what happened.
• Players and Groups — who has been here and what they may do.

Switch on what you want

Each of these is off until you say otherwise, and each is one screen in the editor:

• Operations — restarts that only happen when there is something to gain, backups that share what has not changed, a cleaner that merges before it deletes, and announcements that carry who they are for. Backups stay off until you say where they go — that is the one decision nobody else can make for you.
• Discord — chat both ways, roles that follow a promotion, bans that mean it in both places, the console in a channel, tickets, and a way for somebody to prove an account is theirs (/discord link in game, /link <code> on Discord). It needs a bot token, and the bot needs Message Content and Server Members switched on where you made it.
• Votes — both of the protocols vote sites use, at once, so it works on all of them rather than half. Votes that arrive while somebody is away are kept and paid when they next join.
• Playtime ranks — promotion on hours played.
• Accounts — on an offline server, a password, a question on Discord, or both.
• Skins — real faces on an offline server, and /skin from a link.
• Moderation — bans, kicks, and the screen a player is shown.
• The assistant — off until you point it at a model. It reads your server's numbers and answers questions about them; anything it wants to change it proposes, and you decide.

Everything is reachable four ways

Whatever you set up, the same thing can be done from the file, from the console, from the editor and over the interface. Nothing is a browser-only feature — which matters at two in the morning when the browser is the one thing you do not have.

And every settings change is recorded with what the value was before it, so /keystone set history and /keystone set undo <number> exist for the evening it turns out to have been the wrong idea.